Calorie bombs wins 'awards'

A dish made for Homer Simpson: The Cheesecake Factory's Crispy Chicken Costoletta. PHOTO POSTED TO FLICKR BY VANESSA CHETTLEBURGH

The average adult should consume about 2,000 calories, 20 grams of saturated fat and 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day.

Eating just one meal on a public advocacy group's new Xtreme Eating Awards list would wreck that diet in an instant.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has released its dishonor roll for 2013, and there are some doozies. IHOP's country fried steak and eggs are singled out for having more than a day's worth of food in one serving: gravy-slathered deep-fried steak with two fried eggs, fried potatoes and two buttermilk pancakes. The damage: 1,760 calories, 23 g of saturated fat, 3,720 mg of sodium and 11 teaspoons of added sugar.

Also noted are the Cheesecake Factory, with its 2,610-calorie Crispy Chicken Costoletta, and Johnny Rockets, with its bacon cheddar double burger (1,770 calories, 50 g of saturated fat, 2,380 mg of sodium) and the Big Apple Shake, which has 1,140 calories, 37 g of fat and 13 teaspoons of sugar. Mainly thanks to its main ingredient of a slice of apple pie.

"It's as if IHOP, the Cheesecake Factory, Maggiano's Little Italy and other major restaurant chains are scientifically engineering these extreme meals with the express purpose of promoting obesity, diabetes and heart disease," said center executive director Michael F. Jacobson.

The greater a person's body-mass index, the greater the likelihood he'll die in a car crash, compared with a more slender person in the same type of crash, according to a study in the Emergency Medicine Journal.

The journal, part of the BMJ Group, examined 57,491 vehicle collisions in the U.S. between 1996 and 2008. The research found that obese drivers are significantly more likely to die in a crash than people of normal weight. The benchmark for obesity was a BMI of 30, which is a 6-foot person weighing 221 pounds.

The report notes that people who are very obese often don't wear seat belts properly, or forgo them. Also, in a crash, the lap belt around an obese person takes longer to engage the pelvis, allowing the lower body to propel forward.

The study indicated that vehicle designs might have to be changed to accommodate obese occupants.

"The ability of passenger vehicles to protect overweight or obese occupants may have increasingly important public health implications, given the continuing obesity epidemic in the USA," the authors wrote. "It may be the case that passenger vehicles are well designed to protect normal-weight vehicle occupants but are deficient in protecting overweight or obese occupants."

Study links aspirin and vision loss

A new study has found a link between regular aspirin users and a heightened risk of a form of vision loss.

The study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, examined 2,389 Australians age 49 or older. It found that the longer the subject took aspirin, the greater the risk of contracting neovascular age-related macular degeneration, a vision loss in the center of the eye attributed to retina damage. The neovascular type of degeneration, named for abnormal blood-vessel growth, is a leading cause of blindness among older people.

Regular aspirin use, defined as at least once per week, resulted in age-related macular degeneration incidence of 1.9 percent at five years, 7 percent at 10 years and 9.3 percent at 15 years.

The study noted that previous research has drawn a link between regular aspirin use and macular degeneration, while other studies have been inconclusive.

The new study's authors cautioned that the findings didn't show that aspirin caused macular degeneration, and that a decision about whether to discontinue aspirin use should be up to each patient and his doctor.

"From a purely science-of-medicine perspective, the strength of evidence is not sufficiently robust to be clinically directive," wrote two Cedars-Sinai Medical Center doctors in a commentary accompanying the paper.

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